Abelardo Estorino

Abelardo José Estorino López (29 January 1925 – 22 November 2013) was a Cuban dramatist, director, and theater critic.

Abelardo Estorino was born in Unión de Reyes on 29 January 1925.

After Bachillerato studies in Matanzas, he trained as a dental surgeon and practiced as such for three years (1954–1957), dividing time between the job and his literary vocation.

He wrote his first play, Hay un muerto en la calle, in 1954.

It remains unpublished.

The success of his second dramatic work, El peine y el espejo, written in 1956 but released in 1960, placed him firmly in the world of literature and drama.

After studying stage direction at the Teatro Estudio de Cuba and working with Julio Matas and Herberto Dumé, it was the 1960s that marked the growth and direction of his work.

El robo del cochino (1961) and La casa vieja (1964) were his most notable plays from this period.

He continued the decade with Los mangos de Caín (1965) and El tiempo de la plaga, in addition to the comedy Las vacas gordas.

Estorino was the life partner of artist Raúl Martínez.

He also adapted works for the theater, such as El mago de Oz (The Wizard of Oz), El fantasmita, La dama de las camelias (La Dame aux Camélias) (1968), and Las impuras by Miguel de Carrión.

In that decade Estorino traveled to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, joined the National Council of Culture, and participated in the First National Congress of Writers and Artists of Cuba.

During this time he received the first recognitions of his long career, such as mentions for the Casa de las Américas Prize for El robo del cochino and La casa vieja, the latter for the production directed by Berta Martínez.

In the 1970s, in spite of the marginalization that he suffered, like other intellectuals, due to his homosexuality, he did not stop writing.

After directing an adaptation of Lope de Vega's La discreta enamorada, he wrote La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de Don José Jacinto Milanés, a literary work that required him to do complex research into Spanish colonial Cuba.

At this point his output constituted an intimate journey through the intricacies of the human being as part, for good and for bad, of that social structure that is the family, the core on which Estorino focuses to look at the reality of society as a whole.

This explains why many of his plays were successfully performed in theaters in Europe (Norway, Sweden, Spain) and the Americas (United States, Chile, Venezuela).

In the 1980s, his works included Ni un sí ni un no, Pachencho vivo o muerto, Que el diablo te acompañe (1987), Las penas saben nadar (1989), and Morir del cuento, whose production was awarded in Spain, at the Theater Festival of Havana, and by the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.

Abelardo Estorino died in Havana on 22 November 2013.